Blog # 4 Understanding Italian
I looked up information about Rome, Italy on Wikipedia, in
Italian. I used my knowledge of English
vocabulary to comprehend several cognates.
I relied heavily on the limited number of pictures and tables with
captions. I also used my knowledge of
the Roman alphabet and punctuation to distinguish where one word ended and a
new word began. Still, I only
comprehended about fifteen percent of the words, and no complete sentences.
To scale back the task, I searched for Colorado in
Italian. Because of my extensive
background, I could anticipate what information I would encounter. This helped my comprehension climb to around
fifty percent.
I noticed a side bar with basic facts about Colorado. I was able to understand about ninety percent
of the side bar information. Again,
cognates were helpful, as was my background knowledge about Colorado. What was especially helpful was the limited
number of words I had to focus on to comprehend. Only the most important, content rich words were
left. I was able to figure out, for
example, that capoluogo means capitol,
contee means county, and stati federati confinati means bordering states. Some of these words appeared in the initial
entry about Rome, but I wasn’t able to decipher them in that context.
Implications for Language Learners:
-Provide texts with supportive text features, such as
illustrations, photos, tables, graphs, and headings.
-Choose texts that do not contain so many unknown words that
learners are not able to make sense of the texts.
-Highlight the most important concepts
-Teach vocabulary critical to the concept being taught.
I agree that supportive text features are useful, though I wonder about how useful to an ELL student who may not understand the information within the tables, graphs, headings, or even guiding questions? I also think kids might struggle with highlighting important concepts if they can't necessarily comprehend the text at the decoding level. Vocabulary is vital--you're right. I wonder what other strategies might benefit ELL students specifically?
ReplyDeleteI didn't think about searching out a different/specific topic when I was trying to scale back the level. So I could reach an understanding, I searched for children's books and songs because I knew that they would most likely use simpler language. It is interesting that simply by changing the topic to Colorado, your understanding increased substantially. Your experience really speaks to how important background knowledge is. I think that often times we take for granted our background knowledge when teaching, and we don't stop to think about when and how we developed that knowledge bank. It just comes so naturally to me to make connections, but then again I have more life experience.
ReplyDeleteI had a similar experience using cognates and very minimal comprehension; scaling back to Colorado was a great way to increase comprehensibility and an excellent example of how prior knowledge influences comprehension. Your suggestions were appropriate for a variety of learners, including students with learning disabilities.
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